We recently held a BARDS (Bourbon And Rye Drinkers Society) meeting at the Barrell Craft Spirits facility in Louisville. The meeting was hosted by Chris Zaborowski and included a tour of the facility and a blind tasting and blending exercise.
The tour started in the lobby of the Barrell Craft Spirits facility. We were led back through the extensive building, past offices and store rooms, until we got to the bottling room. Barrell Craft Spirits is a company that exclusively, at this time, blends and bottles whiskeys from barrels they have purchased from distilleries all over the country. The bottling lines were modern lines with one line they use for their own products exclusively and another line that they use for contract bottling of products.The lines are automated and they run the lines using three people, but they could only use two if needed. From there we moved first to the loading dock area and then to the place where they empty the barrels for bottling. This latter area had four large dump tanks. They have the blending of their whiskeys down to an exact science. They know exactly how much whiskey they need from a barrel to make their blend and they have many barrels and storage tanks to store the whiskey they don’t use in the blend for future use. We then took a quick break to eat some food that was very good.
We then went to the blending exercise. They had set up four whiskeys in front of us. One was the control, the whiskey we were to replicate from the other three samples. The other three samples were all whiskeys that were in the control, but we had no idea of the age or the proof of each whiskey. They had eye droppers and a flask as part of the exercise. We were to take what we felt were the proper amounts of each whiskey and blend them in the flask. I thought sample two was the oldest because it was the darkest of the three whiskeys, but I was wrong. The sample turned out to be a double barreled whiskey, thus the darkness of the color. I decided that sample three was the dominant flavor of the control so I placed 4 ml of it in the flask to start. I thought sample one was the next flavor I was tasting and put 2 ml of whiskey in the flask. I then put 1 ml from sample two and completed my blend. It turned out I was wrong with my blend as it was mostly made from sample one, followed by sample two and sample three, the oldest of the whiskeys was only about 10% of the blend.
We enjoyed the exercise and much discussion was had by all. The gift shop was open to us with a 20% discount on bottle purchases. I took the opportunity to purchase some bottles for review. We then left the facility after a very enjoyable BARDS meeting, tasting whiskey with friends and appreciating the science of blending.
Photos Courtesy of Mike Veach
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